Former Madison Mayor and devout Democrat Paul Soglin has his hackles raised over a Bush Administration Plan to sell off some public land.
Public Land Sale Proposed: The Bush administration Friday laid out plans to sell off more than $1 billion in public land during the next decade, including 85,000 acres of National Forest property in California.Hizzoner reflexively considers any diminishment of government owned land ownership to be an environmental disaster for the country. This type of response is what logically follows from the belief that communal ownership through the government is better for environment, because private ownership is always subject to the temptation of exploiting the resources for profit. I’m convinced that true believer environmentalist Democrats secretly still desire the elimination of private land ownership.
According the DNR nearly 70 percent of the forest land in Wisconsin is privately owned, and outside of Madison I doubt most state residents worry the environment is collapsing. Admittedly most of Wisconsin’s forests were demolished to build Soglin’s lovingly remembered hometown Chicago, but nature is resilient and Wisconsin is again healthy and beautiful.
Equally troubling to the Democrat in him is the idea that Bush may have stumbled upon a way to bring down the national debt without raising taxes. It has always puzzled me why the discussion about federal revenue never seems to consider selling assets. I suppose that road leads to smaller government which politicians of all stripes find abhorrent.
